Lettie shouted, “Get down!” and she crouched on the moss, pulling me down with her. She lay prone, and I lay beside her, feeling a little silly. The ground was damp.
“How long will we—?”
“Shush!” She sounded almost angry. I said nothing.
Something came through the woods, above our heads. I glanced up, saw something brown and furry, but flat, like a huge rug, flapping and curling at the edges, and, at the front of the rug, a mouth, filled with dozens of tiny sharp teeth, facing down.
It flapped and floated above us, and then it was gone.
“What was that?” I asked, my heart pounding so hard in my chest that I did not know if I would be able to stand again.
“Manta wolf,” said Lettie. “We’ve already gone a bit further out than I thought.” She got to her feet and stared the way the furry thing had gone. She raised the tip of the hazel wand, and turned around slowly.
“I’m not getting anything.” She tossed her head, to get the hair out of her eyes, without letting go of the fork of hazel wand. “Either it’s hiding or we’re too close.” She bit her lip. Then she said, “The shilling. The one from your throat. Bring it out.”
I took it from my pocket with my left hand, offered it to her.
“No,” she said. “I can’t touch it, not right now. Put it down on the fork of the stick.”
I didn’t ask why. I just put the silver shilling down at the intersection of the Y. Lettie stretched her arms out, and turned very slowly, with the end of the stick pointing straight out. I moved with her, but felt nothing. No throbbing engines. We were over halfway around when she stopped and said, “Look!”
I looked in the direction she was facing, but I saw nothing but trees, and shadows in the wood.
“No, look. There.” She indicated with her head.
The tip of the hazel wand had begun smoking, softly. She turned a little to the left, a little to the right, a little further to the right again, and the tip of the wand began to glow a bright orange.
“That’s something I’ve not seen before,” said Lettie. “I’m using the coin as an amplifier, but it’s as if—”
There was a whoompf! and the end of the stick burst into flame. Lettie pushed it down into the damp moss. She said, “Take your coin back,” and I did, picking it up carefully, in case it was hot, but it was icy cold. She left the hazel wand behind on the moss, the charcoal tip of it still smoking irritably.
Lettie walked and I walked beside her. We held hands now, my right hand in her left. The air smelled strange, like fireworks, and the world grew darker with every step we took into the forest.
“I said I’d keep you safe, didn’t I?” said Lettie.
“Yes.”
“I promised I wouldn’t let anything hurt you.”
“Yes.”
She said, “Just keep holding my hand. Don’t let go. Whatever happens, don’t let go.”
Her hand was warm, but not sweaty. It was reassuring.
“Hold my hand,” she repeated. “And don’t do anything unless I tell you. You’ve got that?”
I said, “I don’t feel very safe.”
She did not argue. She said, “We’ve gone further than I imagined. Further than I expected. I’m not really sure what kinds of things live out here on the margins.”
The trees ended, and we walked out into open country.
I said, “Are we a long way from your farm?”
“No. We’re still on the borders of the farm. Hempstock Farm stretches a very long way. We brought a lot of this with us from the old country, when we came here. The farm came with us, and brought things with it when it came. Gran calls them fleas.”
I did not know where we were, but I could not believe we were still on the Hempstocks’ land, no more than I believed we were in the world I had grown up in. The sky of this place was the dull orange of a warning light; the plants, which were spiky, like huge, ragged aloes, were a dark silvery green, and looked as if they had been beaten from gunmetal.
The coin, in my left hand, which had warmed to the heat of my body, began to cool down again, until it was as cold as an ice cube. My right hand held Lettie Hempstock’s hand as tightly as I could.
She said, “We’re here.”
I thought I was looking at a building at first: that it was some kind of tent, as high as a country church, made of gray and pink canvas that flapped in the gusts of storm wind, in that orange sky: a lopsided canvas structure aged by weather and ripped by time.
And then it turned and I saw its face, and I heard something make a whimpering sound, like a dog that had been kicked, and I realized that the thing that was whimpering was me.
Its face was ragged, and its eyes were deep holes in the fabric. There was nothing behind it, just a gray canvas mask, huger than I could have imagined, all ripped and torn, blowing in the gusts of storm wind.
Something shifted, and the ragged thing looked down at us.
Lettie Hempstock said, “Name yourself.”